vtu-datatools/rrchackathon

Real Rent Control Hackathon - Vancouver - Project

Real Rent Control Hackathon

Description:

Vacancy Control, reforming the Tenant Relocation Policy and a Rent Freeze. There are many great, progressive ideas floating around right now, each trying to tackle Vancouver’s housing crisis. The point where all of these different plans intersect is data.

The Real Rent Control Hackathon is an event for local programmers and hacktivists to get involved in our fight for Real Rent Control. Hosted by Vancouver Tenants Union, and Populous Map invite coders of all kinds to come together to help build an open-source tool for accurately tracking rental data across our city.

Goals:

• Foster a grassroots network of activists with technological know-how.
• Champion open source principles and collaborative development practices.
• Harvest public data from online rental resources and monitor common rental websites.
• Save collected data into a database and create a web app with these features:
• Search for information about a specific rental unit.
• Register new rental units manually(pending approval with image verification).
• Display entire rental dataset visually on a map.
• Arm Vancouverites with new tools to enforce rent control and expand tenant rights.
• Geek out and have fun!

Instructions:

1) This project is meant to be completed during the Hackathon Event, but eager participants may get started beforehand.

2) This repository is meant as a collective starting point. It currently contains an empty Ruby on Rails project for us to build from.

3) It is not mandatory that Ruby on Rails be used for this project. If you perfer to use Python and Django or any other frameworks go for it, but your work may not be included in the final project.

4) As described in the Goals, the finished project is expected to:

• Scrape rental data from popular rental websites(eg. www.craigslist.com)
• Automate scraping to repeat every few hours
• Save up to date rental information into a database
• Create a user interface for data visualization and analysis
• UI must include search functions and must display data on a map
• Allow users to input rental information they are willing to provide
• Verify provided information with pictographic proof. (ex. Photo of reciept or screenshot of e-transfer)
• BONUS: Automatically tweet alerts when new online rental postings are 4% or higher relative to the price already listed in the database for that address.(#vanRE #RealRentControl)

5) The finished project will be open source and as much collaboration as possible is encouraged.

6) Our goal is to make a single project. Different parts will be worked on by teams of participants. No matter your technical interests, including data analysis, web developent, UX, graphic design, etc. there is a place for you at this event.

Community:

Join our Discord server to connect with other coders that are going to participate. Join the channels that interest you and start making the plan for our build with the other skilled participants.

Suggested Resources:

• Steps to set up a Rails app, initialize a repo, push to Github and deploy to Heroku
• Beginner’s Guide to Ruby Scraping
• Ruby on Rails Job Scheduling with Resque
• Installing Redis on Windows
• Simple Search in Rails 4
• Best Rails Image Uploader
• Integrate Google Maps into Rails